


One Percent

by gwendee



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternative Perspective, Assassination, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Human Experimentation, Mad Science, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Other, Science Experiments, Science Fiction, canonical violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-01-07
Packaged: 2021-02-25 14:41:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22157758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gwendee/pseuds/gwendee
Summary: Aguri wakes up.“The surgery was a success,” Kotarou says, stroking her hair with an awkward gentleness that he had never possessed when she was alive. He’s missing an eye.“What did you do to me?” She asks him, voice raw with disuse.He tells her, "I made you complete."
Comments: 9
Kudos: 40





	One Percent

**Author's Note:**

> I'm writing so much odd, miscellaneous fics right now. God, I don''t have any multi-chapter fic idea in my mind... well I do, but not any one that I'm particularly motivated to work on. Let's see, I guess.
> 
> For now, here you go. One percent.

**One Percent**

_ Aguri wakes up.  _

  
  


There are  _ calculations  _ to be made and she makes them, fingers flying over the keyboard,  _ one, two, three _ . 

It takes barely a blink (how amazing modern technology is!) and the computer is spitting back numbers to her, embedded within strings of output code, tables and graphs; she’s not looking at any of those, today, there was something just a tad more  _ important _ to be found- 

_ Ah.  _

“How are the calculations going?” Her fiance walks in, a clipboard in his hands. He peers over her shoulder, a hand coming to rest on her back. Her eyes flick up to his, but he’s not looking at her, fixated on the screen before them - so he could see, then, what the numbers meant, was there any purpose for her to yet again report it? 

“Possibility of black matter overloading Subject Zero and causing a catastrophic explosion to wipe out all of humanity?” She almost lets out a derisive snort - no, that was unlike her - but she leans forward to make an annotation in her notebook anyways. 

“One percent.”

There were three things Aguri loves. She loves teaching, she loves science, and she loves her kid sister. 

Akari was only fourteen - only fourteen! And she could make magic, twist art beneath her fingers, laugh with the lights and fly higher, higher than Aguri ever could. Aguri would give her world for her.

She makes a choice, then, running through the corridors with her lab coat flying behind her, his hand in hers pulling her down the expanse of white hallways, behind them the screams punctuated by the mechanical clicking of traps dislodging from the walls. She makes a choice then and thinks,  _ forgive me, Akari _ , because she doesn’t see a way out, otherwise, and she prays,  _ prays _ , that Akari is safe, far away from here, from anywhere that could hurt her,  _ from this place- _

“How’s my sister?” Aguri says, flexing her fingers,  _ her fingers _ , and presses them to the glass. It’s strange, being on the other side of it. It’s cold.

Kotarou looks at her, eyes- no,  _ eye _ , flicking from his clipboard to the clock on the wall. “She should be in school now,” he says, with something he’s not telling her. That’s nice, Aguri thinks, that Akari is keeping up with her education. She wants to ask if Kotarou is taking care of her, but she knows the answer.

“What did you tell her about me?” She asks instead, and watches his lips quirk up ever so slightly. He doesn’t grace her with an answer, but  _ ah _ . The truth, then.

Aguri dies on 15th May, 2014. A tentacle spear - one of the lab’s built-in defense mechanisms, they’re dealing with the dangerous and unpredictable, after all - pierces her through. She smiles at him, Reaper, as he holds her in his arms for the last time, thinks about her students and her kid sister, thinks about throwing her life away behind her on a whim, and thinks about hope.

“If you have only one year left... if you would give your time... Go teach those children... They are lost in dark, just like you... Look at them straight in the eye... and I know you will find your answer.” 

_Aguri wakes up._

“The surgery was a success,” Kotarou says, stroking her hair with an awkward gentleness that he had never possessed when she was alive. Her hands are bound to the table, and she looks up at him.

He’s missing an eye.

“What did you do to me?” She asks him, voice raw with disuse, something twisting in her chest that shouldn't be present,  _ something _ crawling under her skin.

He tells her, "I made you complete."

In their eyes, she’s no longer a person; she reminds herself of that, as her head hits the back of the chair, as the mouth guard gets shoved into her face. She screams, knowing that they can’t hear her - she could never hear  _ him _ , after all, not in this room, but she always watched as he writhed in his restraints, tendrils of white snaking up around the room’s walls.

She doesn’t have her notes now, but she remembers everything he could do. She doesn’t need them.

Kotarou's the only one in her room more often that anything, and otherwise she's alone. A large bulk of people have been murdered by Reaper in his escape, and the remainder are hesitant of her - they see too much of their former colleague in her, and she doesn't blame them. Objectivity was important in research, after all, wasn't that where she failed as a scientist? Her developing feelings for her test subject?

Kotarou had felt nothing for her and he continues to feel nothing. No, perhaps he feels a tad of proprietal pride, or research intrigue, and it's starkly different from the scorn he showed her when she had been his fiance. 

“Your sister stole my research,” Kotarou tells her. He tells her she was there, that night, when a security camera blipped and caught Akari sprinting away from the compound with scrapes on her knees and dust in her hair. It’s not compassion but a morbid curiosity of his, to gauge her reaction. She refuses to give him that pleasure, and meets his raised eyebrow with her own unblinking stare. 

“Did she now,” Aguri humors. Her blood thrums in her veins. What would Akari do?

“Does the name Kayano Kaede mean anything to you?”

Was she eating well? Sleeping well? Did she miss her? “It was the name of a minor character she acted as,” Aguri says. 

“Hm,” Kotarou says, and he leaves it as that.

The boy in front of them screams words she is unable to hear, horrible pained grimaces on his face as he trashes in his bounds, his head anchored in the wire cage as arms of metal clamp down on his skull.

Much later, she watches him rub his eyes and the top of his head, where three tentacles wriggle numbly in place of the original five.

“What happened?” She asks.

Kotarou removes his gloves and makes a face. “He lost,” he says, a sneer on his lips.

“He’s a child,” Aguri says. She thinks of her children, 3-E. She’d been her teacher for barely a week. How are they doing? Who is their new teacher? 

The boy chews on his nails and lips. He doesn’t see her through the one way glass but he does gaze at the wall with weariness in his eyes, and she taps hard on it with her knuckles. He jumps, and whips around to stare at the glass with suspicion, but he can't see Aguri, but for the briefest of moments she sees desperation, and loneliness. Did he think there was someone on the other side of the panel just like him?

Kotarou calls for his attention, and the moment is lost.

Aguri is grateful for the thick panel between them as she watches him work. He can't put his hands on her now, not if he wants to keep them - electricity thrums in her veins and her fingers feel heavy as she presses them to the glass. It's reinforced, after Reaper managed to break out. She wonders how much it would hold, against her.

"You were that," Kotarou says, "teacher, right? In that school?" 

"Yes," Aguri says. She taps her finger against the metal of the bench. The meter on the wall says it's 17 degrees in the room but Aguri doesn't feel a thing. She's been watching the temperature drop for an hour now, she thinks it's an experiment.

"What were your students like?" Kotarou asks almost absently.

Aguri looks at him in surprise. He blinks at himself, as if startled about the unusual question, then shakes his head and leaves the room. Aguri watches the door swing shut, and then she's alone again.

Aguri looks up. 16 degrees.

"I didn't know you got a new test subject," Aguri says, watching the boy spasm on the table. Kotarou's gaze briefly flicks up from his clipboard. 

"He's not new," Kotarou says, pauses. "Five years." 

Aguri scans her mental records - no memory of the boy anyways. White hair and golden eyes were rather distinctive, she wouldn't have missed him. "I've never seen him." 

Kotarou falters and then curses, as if it's slipped his mind Aguri had been unaware of his apparent project. But his face smoothes out - what could she do, on this side of the glass? Could she have done anything even when she stood beside - behind him? "He was at the Hoju facility," he says.

"Ah," Aguri says. Her expression stays impressive. How much had he kept from her, how much was he still hiding? 

Kotarou looks at her for another moment, then turns back to the boy.

She had always been smiling, otherwise, when she had been alive. Now she blinks almost too mechanically, as if it was just a courtesy. Her hair has grown out, she keeps it neat, but her reflection looks almost foreign to her. She hadn't worn her hair past her ears since high school.

Kotarou's lip curls, and he turns away. 

"What are my radiation levels?" Aguri asks, examining her nails. 

"Thirty four," Kotarou says. "How do you feel?"

"Nausea," Aguri says. "Mild, 3. Body aches, moderate, 6."

Kotarou hums. 

"How's my sister?" Aguri asks.

Kotarou smirks like he has an inside joke. He probably does, Aguri's isolated from the world, after all. She's tried to keep count but she doesn't know what day it is. She tracks activity by the people walking past her room, the test subjects that share her room adjacent. 

"She's alive," Kotarou says. 

"Are you going to tell me any more than that?" Aguri asks.

"Will it matter?" Kotarou dismisses. Aguri watches him walk out of the room. She stretches her fingers, and pain sparks up them.

No, not pain.

She's known Kotarou for so long she picks up on his little nuances. His walk is unsteady and the door rattles on its hinges as he slams it too hard, and his knuckles are white against the clipboard. His gaze flicks to the wall adjacent to hers, and she is unsure how she is able to tell that the room is empty.

"You terminated the experiment?" She asks. She wonders what happened. Kotarou had been interested in the boy.

"He was…" He says, spitting the words, " _ inadequate _ ."

Aguri doesn’t say anything. Kotarou has always been selfish with his resources, prematurely cutting off his projects at the first signs of failure. She wonders what sort of task the boy was made to fulfill, how he failed, what constitutes failure in Kotarou’s standards. If she knows him, Kotarou must have pushed the boy beyond breaking point.

There’s a new man in the room adjacent, his face a motley red and disfigured, barely looking human. She doesn't know how long it has been. Losing humanity must be a running theme for this laboratory. Aguri stretches, feeling the cold air rattle in her ribcage.

The mirror is still one way, but the man turns to look through it, as if he knows she’s there. His eyes are hard and sunken-into his skull.

“The perfect test subject,” Kotarou says. His gaze flicks over to Aguri’s room. “I will make you complete.” The words stain the air with a black mark, and the man’s lips curl wickedly. Aguri thinks of Reaper. She wonders if he made it though the labs four walls, if he made it out. She wonders what he's doing.

“How long have you been here?” The red-faced man says, staring at the wall across them, an hour after Kotarou steps out. There are tubes running up his arms and legs, electrodes stuck onto his skin. He’s different, Aguri thinks, because he is a willing participant. She wonders why, wonders who he is.

Aguri doesn’t reply him. The man doesn’t seem bothered.

“I knew someone here, once,” the man says. “Maybe you met him. He left a bit of carnage here, last time I heard. Escaped, might blow up the world.”

Aguri takes a shuddering breath, electricity jumps through her fingertips. "Is that so?" She says, watches the man's eyebrows climb up at her response. 

"It is," the man says, words curling over his tongue. "I knew him, you know. He betrayed me, so I betrayed him." He flexes his arm, muscles rippling and veins bugling. Something runs through them, the same that runs through hers. "I want to flay the flesh from his bones and take my revenge."

Aguri knows a little bit about that, she thinks.

"I hear the scientist has his own agendas," the man says conversationally. "A bunch of children."

Aguri looks over. "Oh?" She says. "Children."

"It seems that the original test subject has taken upon himself to teach a class of middle school children," he says. "What are the chances of that, I wonder."

Aguri wonders too. "How interesting," she says, looking up at the man through her lashes. Is the glass still one way? She doesn't know, but she thinks he can see her anyways. He smiles, tongue running over his sharp teeth, eyes glittering gold.

_ One percent. _

**Author's Note:**

> Heh, I don't have the second part written yet but I will, soon, it should be a two-shot but might go up to 3, depending on how it goes. You're welcome to shoot any ideas for future fics or pick up one of my old ones and twist it into something new, I think we need more writers and I want to read more fics!! Ahh!! I'm going to slowly go through my WIP folder and post as many of my works as I would let see the light of day, this 2020 this gal is going to Complete Things!


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